Academic Taboo, “Religion Not Allowed”: A Short Article Born out of Frustration
Jim Harries (PhD University of Birmingham, UK) is adjunct faculty at William Carey International University. His home language is Dholuo of Kenya. He has lived and worked in East Africa since 1988.
The purpose of this article is to make a case in a brief, succinct, and cutting way, for academia to take issues popularly associated with “religion” very seriously indeed. In order to avoid spending time on articulating the meaning of the term, “religion,” in this paper I largely take a minimalist acceptance of ‘what people think it is.’[1]
Is “keep religion out,” academia’s rallying call?[2] Religion being hard to define is telling in itself. Yet, ‘keeping it out’ sidelines the ways of life of billions. From my experience with rejected articles, I have learned that for scholarly disciplines to thrive requires their maintaining boundaries that exclude challenges to their core secular paradigms. For example, an article I recently submitted to a journal on African affairs entitled, “To Not Engage African People with Respect to Their Faith in God(s) Should Not be Understood as a Choice But as an Error,” was rejected for being more fitted to a “Religious Studies Journal.” The reason for rejecting my article, “Why Social Science Fails Blacks, and How to be Truly Anti-racist,” to a Black Studies journal was that the journal “does not publish articles that promote Christianity.”
Mainstream academia is prejudiced against “religion.” Sidelining the category religion is an excuse for academia to ignore much in the lives of most people around the world. That is apparently justified by a presumed need to follow a sectarian narrow utopian materialist agenda.
While scholarship undertaken by Christians often draws heavily on secular disciplines such as economics, secularists, on the contrary, routinely avoid quoting the Bible, or any implication that they are drawing on the gospel of Jesus.[3] Contemporary media follows suit, often quoting many great scholars, while avoiding the Bible. This despite the latter being the most popular book in the world,[4] and despite the history of all academic disciplines being traceable back into an age when the church had a hegemonic role in guiding almost all that went on in people’s lives. From the twelfth century, and quite likely earlier, to beyond 1800, the dominance of the church in European affairs was rarely challenged (Grant 1986, 49; Hahn 1986, 256).
Religion gives goalposts, takes away goal posts, and moves goalposts (Reitan 2010). I suggest that it should be central to every discipline. Much of academia remains rooted in secular positivism, lumping ways of life like Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam, into the same category, namely, religion. Yet, whether one is a Christian or a Muslim can be far more consequential to life than whether one is Marxist or Capitalist. That consequentiality is in a blind-spot of academia. One might wonder, why does academia have such blind-spots?
Someone might argue that academia does not deal with the supernatural. I suggest, neither do religions. “Supernatural” is a modern concept, invented in Europe in the sixteenth century (Deason 1986). The category of “supernatural” is not found in African worldviews for example, yet there are millions of Christians in Africa. (A prerequisite for the category ‘supernatural’ is that there be a category of ‘natural’ in the first place. African people who traditionally do not distinguish between physical and so-called ‘spiritual’ causation, clearly do not have such a category.) Supernatural is what is “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature” (https://www.lexico.com/definition/supernatural). N. T. Wright confirms the supernatural verses natural distinction to have been an enlightenment invention. “The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads” (Wright 2003, 707).
“Supernatural” presumably includes things like personal free choice, gravity, and questions like “what is life?” In fact, the essence of human life itself is a great mystery. Without life there would be no perception of anything, so no academia. For God to be as mysterious as life is challenging enough, without having to define God as the counter-thesis to a modern scholarly concept of “natural.” For academia to consider “religions” to be more supernaturalistic than science or any other human activity, is misleading.
Academia’s epistemological stand remains firm only if confined to modern Western circles (Kisner 2020). Today’s secular thinking was built on a foundation of now-defunct positivism,[5] in an age in which non-Westerners were considered relations of apes, as a Black scholar recounts (Kendi 2018, 552). Academia is only ‘global’ to those in the majority world who agree because they are paid to do so, who learn by rote, using English, from the West.[6] To prevent whistle blowers from declaring this, indigenous others are paid to comply in the sense that apparent adherence to modern academia can bring enormous material and prestige rewards. Such rewards are totally disproportionate to what is on offer to followers of traditional ways of life and users of indigenous languages. When the latter are referenced, it is in a context of domination by Western thinking (Kisner 2020).
But even Western academics are now realizing that abstract concepts such as inter-human connection are important (Thigpen 2020). Peace is imperative for human thriving. “Narrative is the best teacher,” some declare (Freeman 2015). Such people can be seen as “re-inventing the wheel,” i.e., the Bible, the long-extant crowd-sourced “soft narrative.”[7] But academia seems to consider true wisdom to have been born with the rise of science and the Age of Reason. Thus, they reject out-of-hand millennia of accumulated wisdom that underlies biblical and other traditions. Well-tried older Scriptures include prescriptions for issues “hidden since the foundation of the world” of which moderns remain unaware, according to René Girard. (Girard 1987).
Academics have realised that (voluntary) adherence to Christianity often totally transforms someone’s life. Should that not be a motivation to engage with the life and words of Jesus, and those of his scriptural predecessors?
Conclusion
“Anthropologists have neglected Christianity for reasons that now seem implausible,” says Timothy Jenkins (Jenkins 2012, 459). Academic taboo of what is known as religion requires urgent condemnation in favor of listening to more voices, who need not be considered to be inspired by anything supernatural.
References
Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. 2011. ‘Introduction.’ In Rethinking Secularism, edited by Craig Calhoun, et al., 3-30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deason, Gary B. 1986. “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature.” In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers., 167-91. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Freeman, Mark, 2015. “Narrative Hermeneutics.” In The Wiley Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Methods, Approaches, and New Directions for Social Sciences edited by Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman, and Kathleen Slaney, 234-47. Chichester: Wiley.
Girard, René. 1987. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press
Grant, Edward. 1986. “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages.” In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, 49-75. London: University of California Press.
Gutt, Ernst-August. 2005. ‘On the Significance of the Cognitive Core of Translation.’ The Translator 11 (1): 25-49.
Hahn, Roger. 1986. “Laplace and the Mechanistic Worldview.” In God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, 256-76. London: University of California Press.
Harries, Jim. 2007. ‘Pragmatic Theory Applied to Christian Mission in Africa: with Special Reference to Luo Responses to “Bad” in Gem, Kenya.’ PhD Thesis. The University of Birmingham. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/15/ (accessed 2nd January 2010).
______. 2011. ‘Pragmatic Linguistics Applied to Bible Translation, Projects, and Inter-cultural Relationships: An African focus.’ In: Vulnerable Mission: Insights into Christian Mission to Africa from a Position of Vulnerability, edited by Jim Harries, 57-80. Pasadena: William Carey Library.
______. 2012. “Witchcraft, Envy, Development, and Christian Mission in Africa.” Missiology: An International Review 40 (2): 129-39.
______. 2019a, “Magic, Divine Revelation and Translation in Theological Education in the Majority World Today (with a Focus on Africa).” Missionalia, 47 (2): 165-76. https://missionalia.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/265 DOI: https://doi.org/10.7832/47-2-265.
______. 2019b. “Practising Mission and Development in a Multi-lingual African Context of Jostling for Money and Power.” Evangelical Review of Theology 43 (2): 152-66.
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Kendi, Ibram X. 2018. “Black Doctoral Studies: The Radically Anti-racist Idea of Molefi Kete Asante.” Journal of Black Studies 49 (6): 542-58.
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[1][1] While the Oxford Dictionary defines religion as: “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods,” an alternative definition could be “a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion.” Understandings of what religion is are clearly diverse. I acknowledge there are major difficulties with the term, that I address elsewhere. (See Harries, 2013.)
[2] This has changed a little since the 1970s, but is evidently still very much the case. (Meister n.d.).
[3] As demonstrated by the article rejections I relate at the start of this article.
[4] It is estimated that more than five billion copies of the Bible have been sold. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-best-selling-books-of-all-time.html
[5] There is much ongoing debate on the contemporary legitimacy of positivism. Positivism is clearly based on an assumption that is in absolute terms arbitrary, that everything should be positivistic.
[6] “There is still much about the reality of transnationally trained scholars we do not know about or that we (erroneously) assume must be the case” write Phan, Kelley and Curarming, putting ‘erroneously’ in brackets to illustrate the difficulty and sensitivity of this issue. (Phan, Kelley, and Curaming 2020, 189).
[7] I use the term “soft-narrative” to describe the Bible because, certainly in our day and age, following it is a choice, and not mandated.